9:14am
The punters continue to file in as we wait for the keynote to begin.
"Entertainment" is provided by a band featuring accordians, banjos and saws. For a conference to the future, playing "Hits from the backwoods" circa 1890 makes as much sense as these lyrics. Thankfully my mp3 player is numbing the pain with Trent Reznor.

9:15am
The usefulness of twitter appears, on a screen to the side are twitters from people attending MIX.
One says "running late, have to run up road". Never felt the need to tell the world my exact movements, especially when I am being tardy.

9:22am
Twitters appear complimenting the band, I am lost for words.

9:27am
Fighting the twin ravages of overloaded wireless connectivity and a suspect laptop battery, the crowd awaits the announcement today regarding Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash competitor — although Microsoft are at pains to remind people that it isn't a competitor of Flash.

9:32am
"Free massages at noon today" the notice tells the crowd, this is followed by "(no not that kind)". At least they know the audience.

9:39am
A history lesson of "Web vs PC". AJAX gets a mention as does Win32, waiting for the killer punch Silverlight announcement.

9:47am
Here comes the news: Silverlight is getting broader. ".NET technology is coming together with Silverlight" is the quote, one question though — was it ever apart?

9:51am
A video showing the capabilities of WPF is shown. The crowd goes wild.
Fans of Quartz and Cairo get a sense of deja vu.

9:53am
All punters have scored themselves a free copy of Expression studio that starts shipping today.

9:56am
Silverlight Streaming annoucement — "Open interoperable platform for you to develop services".
This looks like an ActiveX control in a web page, allowing you to embed applications within a browser.

10:00am
Scott Guthie, general manager developer platform, takes over the show. He will be doing a series of Silverlight demonstrations.

10:01am
"Silverlight includes a cross-platform version of the .NET framework", by cross platform they mean Windows + OSX but what does this mean for Mono?

10:04am
Silverlight can do up to 720p HD quality video. Your ISP will thank you for your excessive 720p streaming every month. Users with anything less than a fat pipe of bandwidth need not apply.
Silverlight also has a TCO angle — surprise, surprise.

10:10am
An early Silverlight adopter is demonstrating their Silverlight video player. Good thing the demo IP begins with "192." — look at that "awesome" speed [/sarcasm]
The player was built in three weeks from XAML, not a bad turnaround.

10:19am
Our next demo is running out of the filesystem. Boy those videos load quick!! [/yet more sarcasm]

10:20am
Expression Studio has just crashed. You knew it would happen at some point.

10:22am
Media Encoder Preview allows you to have a swipe bar to compare the "original" and "encoded" video. Nice for wow factor.

10:32am
As the demo for the designer tools continues, the man beside me has fallen asleep.
He misses the ending wow moment as a video falls to pieces and keeps playing.

10:34am
Next presenter is Jonathon Leess, president and general manager of CBS Digital Media. He is speaking about their user generated content strategy, with Silverlight of course.

10:41am
A lot of what has been shown from CBS looks like a Flex app.

10:44qm
Silverlight Streaming allows developers to upload any number of 10 minute videos up to 4GBs worths.

10:46am
Features of .NET in a browser:
- Multi language support
- Browser CLR is same as desktop CLR, high performance claims over Javascript
- mini-WPF library available
- DOM integration
- Built in networking stack
- LINQ API included

10:51am
Demonstration of installing the plugin on an XP machine.
See "Scott's Chess App" inside Silverlight API for your dose of a Javascript bagging game.

10:56am
Demo of debugging on a Mac from within Visual Studio on a Windows machine. Guthie says "In case you don't realise it, this was really hard to do".

11:07am
Despite an impressive demo of a rich Silverlight application, the natives are getting restless.

11:14am
Silverlight based video editting application delivered in less than 50k. Not bad at all.

11:21am
IronRuby is now part of .NET — demonstration of a Lighttpd server on a Mac with Ruby serving Silverlight content.

11:40am
Impressive demonstration of MLB.com's new gameday live baseball application. Featuring video on video, chat to friends, widgets in the media player — and it works on a mobile phone as well.

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About Chris Duckett

Some would say that it is a long way from software engineering to journalism, others would correctly argue that it is a mere 10 metres according to the floor plan.During his first five years with CBS Interactive, Chris started his journalistic advent...

Full Bio

Some would say that it is a long way from software engineering to journalism, others would correctly argue that it is a mere 10 metres according to the floor plan.During his first five years with CBS Interactive, Chris started his journalistic adventure in 2006 as the Editor of Builder AU after originally joining the company as a programmer.Leaving CBS Interactive in 2010 to follow his deep desire to study the snowdrifts and culinary delights of Canada, Chris based himself in Vancouver and paid for his new snowboarding and poutine cravings as a programmer for a lifestyle gaming startup.Chris returns to CBS in 2011 as the Editor of TechRepublic Australia determined to meld together his programming and journalistic tendencies once and for all.In his free time, Chris is often seen yelling at different operating systems for their own unique failures, avoiding the dreaded tech support calls from relatives, and conducting extensive studies of internets — he claims he once read an entire one.